Transport demand development in Germany after the unification

The political changes in European east-west relations after opening the borders will be reflected in new dimensions of economic activity and commercial exchange. This will have far-reaching consequences for the development of transport in the east-west direction in Europe. The German Ministry of Transport has charged a team of consulting companies and University Institutes to work out an integrated master plan for the unified Germany. The forecasts which have been performed for this master plan will be presented in this article. They consist of a forecast of the socioeconomic development in German and European regions, of predicting the car ownership and deriving the traffic volumes and kilometers traveled in passenger’s and good’s transport as well as the spatial distribution of transport flows. These data are generated for the major transport modes such that the resulting flow matrices can be used as a base for the traffic assignment. All models used are policy sensitive such that they can produce consistent patterns of transport activities for every set of infrastructure/regulation policies. This property has been used to develop the first master plan for the federal transport infrastructure in the unified Germany.